In a letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company had a solid 2024 and wants to build on that by maximizing artificial intelligence and cutting back on red tape.
A major point that Jassy made in the letter regarded AI. Of course, Amazon’s AWS business-to-business operation supports AI operations, but Jassy discussed how generative AI, in particular, will be a force driving developments in the future.
“Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized,” he wrote. “The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance, for example, customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc. This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks, everything. Some of these areas are already seeing rapid progress. Others are still in their infancy. But, if your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive. How soon? It won’t all happen in a year or two, but it won’t take 10 either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.
Jassy maintained that, soon, just about every customer experience at retail will be reshaped by AI, so companies need to invest deeply and broadly.
“That’s why there are more than 1,000 GenAI applications being built across Amazon, aiming to meaningfully change customer experiences in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming video and music, advertising, healthcare, reading, and home devices, to name a few.”
In part, the letter was a critique of Amazon’s approach to leadership and innovation, and suggested that the company needed to haul closer to the original entrepreneurial way of doing business, especially as to speed of developing ideas and building better processes.
A way to get speedier, Jassy asserted, “is to eliminate bureaucracy. There is a difference between process and bureaucracy. When you’re running something at scale, you need mechanisms to deliver the right experience and constant improvement for customers. However, as companies grow and add more managers, unneeded processes get layered on that add little value. Last fall, I asked teammates across the company to send me bureaucracy examples that they were experiencing. I’ve received almost 1,000 of these emails and read every single one. Builders hate bureaucracy. It slows them down, frustrates them and keeps them from doing what they came here to do. As leaders, we don’t always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do. We’ve already made over 375 changes based on this feedback. We need to move fast, and we are committed to rooting out bureaucracy that ties up time and dispirits our teammates.”
